I respect your decision to not want to defame your former employer, you better than anyone know the rhetoric flying around on the internet about your involvement with Civ 5. I am sure your a nice guy and we have all been in over our head, or not supported with a proper budget or team, and various things that cause problems for anyone doing jobs and projects. I truly hope you, Kael and Brad succeed with Elemental.
That being said a choice to honor a prior companies policy is just that its a choice not a contract. And the result of that is people will draw their own conclusion based upon information they can obtain. Maybe you know those conclusions are wrong. But you and Brad and everyone needs to stop telling us how wrong we all are (I have read pretty much all the threads) if your unwilling to give us accurate information. There are consequences to choices you can't have it both ways, this is an unfortunate reality of life for everyone in almost every choice a person makes.
I am just going to guess but maybe you know you made some bad design decisions on Civ 5. I don't think thats that big of a deal, personally hexes and 1upt inmho were great decisions that with a little more AI work would give it that classic panzer general type wargame feel. But some of the others well ..
Anyways what I am getting at is maybe this is a second chance for you and I hope that whatever huberis or ego you may have acquired in this industry is tempered and maybe youll go play some more of the classic tbs games, some of the newer highly invoative board games, and maybe incorporate more ideas and hard playtesting into Elemental to make it the game we all want.
From the information I have gleaned I think your an extremly hard worker (heard you got onto the dev team at firaxis by documenting the code base) and I hope the best for you in your new job (which you should be thankful to have in this economy.
